PortaPottyBossPro Blog — Construction Site Accounts

Monthly Statements for Contractor Porta Potty Accounts: One Bill, Every Site

Why Contractors Want One Bill

A general contractor with six projects does not want sixty invoices a month. Their accounts payable team has to match every bill to a project, get it approved and pay it. The more paper you send, the slower you get paid. A single statement that covers every site, with each line clearly labeled, is easier for them to process and faster for you to collect.

Closing out a project cleanly, as covered in Pulling Porta Potties at the End of a Construction Project, is half of good construction billing. The other half is how the charges reach the contractor every month while projects are running.

Setting an Account to Monthly

Any client can be set to Monthly. Once set, the contractor gets one statement each month covering every job at every one of their sites. Each line on the statement is labeled with the site address, so the bookkeeper can see that a line belongs to the Main Street clinic and not the warehouse on Route 9.

Set the billing method when you create the account, or change it when a contractor grows to the point where per-job invoices are a burden. Smaller contractors who prefer a card on file can stay that way. Card on File or Net Terms: Choosing How Contractors Pay for Porta Potties covers how to choose.

What Shows on the Statement

Everything done for that contractor during the month appears on the statement: deliveries, weekly service, extra pump-outs, relocations, pickups and any other service from your service list. Extra rental days are added automatically as "Extra rental days" when units run past the days included.

Sales tax is set per site. A builder with projects in different tax areas gets the right tax on each line without the office calculating it by hand.

Because the statement is built from the jobs themselves, it is only as good as the job records. If a driver delivered two extra units and nobody recorded them, they will not be on the statement. That is one more reason to record every delivery, addition and pickup as its own job, with the right unit types and quantities, as the work happens rather than at the end of the month.

Make the Statement Easy to Read

A statement is only easy to process if the site names make sense to the contractor. Name each job site the way the contractor refers to it, and include the street address. Avoid internal shorthand that only your office understands.

Use custom fields on the client for anything the contractor's accounting team asks you to include, such as a vendor number. When a contractor asks for something specific on every bill, write it down on the client so whoever runs billing next month knows.

Getting Paid

The contractor can see invoices and pay online from the customer app. If they keep a card on file, it can be charged on a schedule. If they pay by check or another method, you record the payment against the account.

Past-due follow-up keeps aging balances from sliding. The terms you give contractors are your decision. Some companies give larger builders a set number of days to pay; others want payment on receipt. The software sends the statement on time and follows up on what is past due, which is what keeps cash coming in.

Statements and Disputes

Most billing disputes on construction accounts come from three things: units the contractor did not know were still on site, extra days they did not expect, and charges they cannot match to a project. A good statement handles all three.

Each line is labeled with the site address, so the project is clear. Extra rental days are listed as their own line, so the reason for the charge is clear. And job records with dates and driver photos back up each delivery, service and pickup. When a bookkeeper calls with a question, the office can answer it from the job history in a few minutes.

Send statements on the same day every month. Contractors' accounting teams run on schedules, and a statement that arrives at a predictable time gets processed at a predictable time. A statement that shows up whenever the office gets to it tends to get paid whenever their office gets to it.

Reports Across Accounts

Because every job ties back to one client, reports by account show what each contractor spent, across every site, for any period. That is useful at the end of a year when a contractor asks for a summary, and it shows you which builders matter most to your business. Reports by Contractor Account: Knowing Which Builders Pay Your Bills covers reports in more detail.

One bill per contractor per month is a simple promise, and it makes your company easier to work with than one that sends a pile of invoices. To see monthly billing alongside job sites and rental tracking, visit PortaPottyBossPro construction porta potty rental software.